1st Edition
Challenges and Innovations in Speaking Assessment
The assessment of second language speaking ability has played a central role in the evolution of language testing theory and practice. Educational Testing Service (ETS) has been a primary innovator in all dimensions of speaking assessment since the 1970s, addressing critical challenges through the advent of new test designs, scoring practices, and measurement technologies to make especially large-scale, standardized testing of speaking ability a reality.
This volume presents a sample of key ETS research and development efforts related to speaking assessment over the years. The contributors highlight diverse contributions to conceptualizing the speaking construct, designing speaking test tasks, scoring speech samples, marshalling technologies for test delivery and automated scoring, and developing end-to-end speaking assessment procedures. The first part emphasizes how some of the earliest large-scale speaking assessments were designed and put into practice. The second part features research and development related to speaking assessments in the TOEIC and TOEFL testing suites, emphasizing their validity and scoring. The third part introduces research-based innovations in testing new and more nuanced speaking constructs, and in using automated scoring of speech to address diverse assessment needs.
The volume will appeal to language testing professionals and test score users in illuminating how ETS has influenced the development of speaking assessment as well as pointing to multiple directions for future research and practice.
List of Contributors
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Assessing second language speaking at ETS: Introduction (John M. Norris & Larry Davis)
Part 1: ETS speaking tests from the 1970s through the 1990s
Chapter 2: Historical perspectives on the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview: ETS contributions (Judith Liskin-Gasparro)
Chapter 3: The TOEFL Test of Spoken English and the Genesis of an ETS Approach to Speaking Assessment (Larry Davis)
Part 2: Design and operation of large-scale speaking tests
Chapter 4: Validity considerations for testing speaking in the workplace: The TOEIC Speaking test (Jonathan Schmidgall)
Chapter 5: Speaking test tasks for young language learners: Development and validation (Edward P. Getman)
Chapter 6: Large-scale human scoring of speaking (Cathy Wendler, Nancy Glazer, & Jeffrey Bard)
Chapter 7: Use of formulaic language in TOEFL iBT speaking responses: Implications for scoring (Xiaoming Xi, Pam Mollaun, & Larry Davis)
Part 3: Innovations in speaking constructs, tasks, and technologies
Chapter 8: Pragmatically speaking: Contexts, forms, and functions in L2 speaking assessment (Veronika Timpe-Laughlin)
Chapter 9: The use of video in integrated speaking tasks: Test-taker perceptions and task performance (Ching-Ni Hsieh, Larry Davis, Yuan Wang, Pam Mollaun, & Jonathan Schmidgall)
Chapter 10: Aligning machine-generated feedback on speaking performance with human judgments: Some initial explorations (Lin Gu, Pam Mollaun, Jeremy Lee, Yuan Wang, Fred Tstutagawa, Saerhim Oh, Jorge Luis Beltrán Zúñiga)
Index
Biography
Larry Davis is Research Director of the Center for Language Education and Assessment Research at Educational Testing Service, USA.
John M. Norris is Principal Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service Japan.
